Could the Internet be reaching breaking point?

[Billyone]

I am no expert but it seems that we could be in trouble in the near future.

 

So better surf all you and surf before it is all too late

 

 

 

You Say

Published June 24, 2010

 

Could the Internet be reaching breaking point?

There's an urgent need to simplify things and collapse data centre architectures

 

 

By ADAM JUDD

 

 

THE Internet has become part of our lives faster than any technology in world history. So it's fair to ask - how's it doing? Could it be breaking?

 

 

Well, it's certainly creaking! From the first Web browsers in the early 1990s to today's 1.7 billion users, the Internet has grown exponentially. One petabyte can hold about 20 million, four-door filing cabinets full of text - or 500 billion pages of printed text - and, using a conservative methodology, we estimate that the growth in petabytes per month will result in Internet traffic growing almost 30-fold by 2020.

 

While demand growth is good and drives us forward, making new things possible, the economics of the Internet are not keeping up with this growth in demand.

 

In fact, the underlying economic model that built the Internet is breaking. Data compiled from the service provider world - the big, global telecommunications carriers that have essentially been building the Internet since the early 1990s - shows that revenue from Internet services has been growing roughly in parallel with the investments required to keep building the Net, allowing service providers to put profits back into Internet extensions. So far, so good.

 

But the costs to continue building the Net will continue to increase by 18-20 per cent every year from now to 2020, while revenue from Internet services will only increase by 5 per cent a year in that same timeframe.

 

Flatter revenue means less profit to reinvest in Internet extension and innovation. This is true for any technology: so, without ongoing innovation, the Internet stagnates - meaning, access costs go up, service quality goes down, and growth dies.

 

In fact, we estimate that this 'breaking point' in the service provider arena may occur as soon as 2014. And we think that this economic breakdown we're seeing in the service provider world is coming to the world of enterprise networks as well. If we don't continue to find new innovations in the way we network our enterprises, we face the same decline in performance, reliability, and security.

 

So as we look at enterprise network needs and build-out costs over the next 15 to 20 years, enterprises will be facing a big problem.

 

Should enterprises care?

 

Yes, their future networks need ongoing innovations in performance, reliability and security just as much as anyone's - if not more so.

 

According to analysis firm Gartner, data centre consolidation exercises will continue throughout 2010, with adoption of more server virtualisation technology and application services, and these will make the data centre more congested than ever.

 

Enterprises will also focus on increasing employee productivity by leveraging available technology such as unified communication and video conferencing to continue to focus on ICT innovation to increase their bottom line. And don't forget that end-users are now demanding more connectivity these days, and allowing them to do so increases productivity for enterprises as well, with richer content and traffic in the enterprise network.

 

At the same time, enterprise CIOs are still pressured to control operational costs, yet these ambitious goals mean a lot of high-performance networking - in the data centre, in the campus, and in the branch. It's clear that network-based systems are essential to their mission, particularly as network technology and connectivity continue to speed up.

 

With more devices doing more things, there will be more congestion, which impacts performance and service in an enterprise network, while security vulnerabilities are breaking through perimeter defence firewalls between devices, applications and networks, letting malware in.

 

In an enterprise, performance, security and reliability are non-negotiable. This all means that legacy approaches just aren't sustainable. This is true in the data centre, and it's true everywhere in an enterprise network.

 

Enterprises face space and energy-efficiency demands from the data centre to the branch network, and gains in power efficiency mean 'doing more for less'. ICT carbon footprints are becoming common in RFPs (request for proposals), and governments are starting to regulate certain industries. While such efficiency directly benefits the bottom line of an enterprise, it imposes huge demands for reduced space and energy use in the very near term.

 

If you add in the 'green' space and energy efficiencies required by enterprises, then we have to add sustainability to the requirements for performance, security, and reliability. So all said, enterprises have some very tough goals to reach, in a very short time.

 

The typical network architecture found in most data centres is actually two different networks: a storage area network and an Ethernet backbone. In both cases, there are multiple tiers of autonomous devices that are attempting to cooperate to create 'a network'. So, in the end, it is a very complex and expensive environment. This matters, because data centres drive enterprise networks on the ground, and increasingly, in the cloud. This kind of complexity is the enemy of performance, security, reliability, and scalability.

 

A simplified approach

 

The strategic approach we have to take is to simplify things and collapse data centre architectures to enable the exponential scaling in performance, security and reliability needed to meet future networking demands and leverage possible cloud solutions. The goal here is a simple, flat data centre fabric that ultimately connects all the elements of the data centre, yet maintaining the simplicity of a single switch, with a single control plane which can scale for cloud-ready applications.

 

This is where I see the data centre going, because there's no other way to scale to meet the network demands enterprises face - and truly leverage the cloud where they can. Given the enterprise agenda for 2010, IT and next-generation program networking will clearly be essential enablers for the achievement of enterprise goals.

 

Without these continuing investments in innovation, and new approaches to networking that enable scaling to the levels of performance, security, reliability and sustainability that enterprises need. we see the same economic threat facing enterprise networks that is facing the Internet.

 

The writer is senior vice-president of Juniper Networks Asia Pacific

 

 

[LoverofCar]

How come they never take technology advancement into consideration.....When we are playing with game boy...did anyone think of PSP?...SIAO

[Bystander50]

When IPv6 is implemented and replaces IPv4, we'll not run out of addresses.

 

There'll be advancements in speed, even when not possible due to cable/fiber optics limitations, someone will come out with better compression technologies to speed up the data transfer.

 

 

[Zhihao]

But the costs to continue building the Net will continue to increase by 18-20 per cent every year from now to 2020, while revenue from Internet services will only increase by 5 per cent a year in that same timeframe.

 

if the above is true, then we may indeed have a problem...

the challenge now is the race to bring down TCO of running a DC and accelerate growth

[Ahleon]

"The writer is senior vice-president of Juniper Networks Asia Pacific"

 

"A simplified approach

 

The strategic approach we have to take is to simplify things and collapse data centre architectures to enable the exponential scaling in performance, security and reliability needed to meet future networking demands and leverage possible cloud solutions. The goal here is a simple, flat data centre fabric that ultimately connects all the elements of the data centre, yet maintaining the simplicity of a single switch, with a single control plane which can scale for cloud-ready applications. "

 

 

Could it be he's just pushing out their new network architecture?

 

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog...sco-data-center